An Orlando Landmark

Since the late 1950s we have proudly owned the World's Largest Board: an impressive 23 feet long, 4 inches thick piece of redwood. It has been featured in the Orlando Sentinel at least twice and was a popular "attraction" back in the day as a photo spot. We proudly earned this impressive piece of wood through a sales initiative the Pacific Lumber Co. had way back then.

You can read more about the board and its history in the Orlando Sentinel's most recent article, Ask Orlando: World's Largest Board.

A Little Background on the Wood

What follows is general background on the material and the company behind the board, drawn from public sources, rather than anything new about the board itself.

The board is redwood, and the commercial redwood of the West Coast comes from the coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens), a species native to a narrow strip of the Northern California and southern Oregon coast. Coast redwoods are the tallest trees on Earth, with the largest individuals topping 350 feet, and some have lived for more than 2,000 years. The lumber is prized for two reasons. The heartwood is naturally high in tannins, which give it its red color and make it resistant to rot, fungus, and insects without any treatment. And because the trees grow so tall and straight, old-growth logs could yield long, clear boards of a size no other commercial species could match. That is exactly what makes a single 23-foot, 4-inch-thick plank so unusual: a board that size had to come from a very large, very old tree.

The Pacific Lumber Company

The Pacific Lumber Company, often shortened to PALCO, was founded in 1863 and made its headquarters in Scotia, California, a company town on the Eel River in Humboldt County. It began with about 6,000 acres of timberland and grew to more than 200,000 acres, and its Mill B, built in 1910, was described as the world's largest redwood lumber manufacturing facility. For most of the 20th century Pacific Lumber was one of the best known names in redwood, which is why a promotional sales program from the company would have mattered to lumber and building material dealers across the country in the 1950s. The company changed hands in a 1986 takeover, filed for bankruptcy in 2007, and its Scotia operations continued under the Humboldt Redwood Company from 2008.

Why a Board Became a Landmark

Oversized roadside displays were a fixture of mid-century America, when family road trips and the growth of Florida tourism made a "world's largest" anything an easy way to get travelers to stop, take a picture, and remember a business. A giant plank outside a lumber and building materials dealer fit that tradition well. Decades later, the board serves less as a marketing piece and more as a reminder of an earlier era of Orlando commerce, from a time before the theme parks defined the city.

Learn more about Mills & Nebraska, founded in Orlando in 1933, and how the company got its name.